Põltsamaa Opens Wine Cellars for Summer Season

The Põltsamaa castle in Jõgeva County has opened its doors to the public for the summer season, introducing the region’s wine and canned fruit production history, which dates back to the 1920s.

Põltsamaa, a town with the population of around 4,500, is known as the center of the Estonian fruit wine production. The 13th century Põltsamaa Castle houses both wine cellars and a food museum.

Throughout the summer, visitors will be able to learn, for example, about coffee packaging at the factory in the 1920s and see which canned foods produced there were personal favorites of Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

Põltsamaa having been one of the first places in the Soviet Union that started experimental production of food preserves for space missions, it also received a visit last fall by two legendary Soviet cosmonauts, Alexei Leonov and Gerogi Gretshko, who brought along samples of modern space food. Those will be displayed next to the tube-foods meant for cosmonauts of the 1970s - which, by the way, were marketed as a novelty food item at general stores at the time.

Guests can also see fruit wines bottled in the early 1920s at the Põltsamaa Winery.